Graphic Novel Review: SAVAGE

SAVAGE

From creator Jeff Frank comes a new horror saga in called SAVAGE. Frank co-plotted this story with Steve Niles (one of the creators behind the phenomenal hit 30 Days of Night) and co-wrote this story with Dan Wickline. SAVAGE concerns Sam, a man with a deep urge and secret that compells him to kill people he deems “evil.” You see, Sam is a hunted of all manner of monsters that prey on the human species. In the beginning of the story we see Sam savagely kill a banshee by cutting off her head (he then carries the head around with him throughout the rest of the series). Once completely that mission Sam then heads towards Arcana, a place he has visited in the past but is now here on a recruitment mission.

Sam is in the town no longer then ten minutes before he begins to once agin sense evil and the urge to kill begins to surface. Sam has come to Arcana to inlist Peter, a family man with a wife and kid, to help him fight the evil of the world. You see, Sam is a shapeshifter who can change into a “bigfoot-like” creature and the evil he senses in Arcana is of the werewolf kind, which have taken up residence in town and kill whenever the moon is at its fullest. As Sam waits for the moon to be full and the werewolves to reveal their true nature, he tries to hold off his killer urges by selectively killing off the werewolves one by one until the killings raise the suspicions of the covert military group Sam is working for. Now time is running out as Sam realizes he has very little time to show Peter his true nature and how to use his own shapeshifting abilities to not only hunt down evil but to protect his family from those who would see them harmed.

Although not one of my favorite graphic novels as the story is very simple and direct and leaves much to be desired since this would be the first chapter of a much larger story, SAVAGE isn’t terrible bad as the werewolves verses bigfoot idea is very interesting. I do like the fact that the story spends a lot of time developing the Sam and peter characters but the werewolves come off a cliched characters with very little interest. It will be interesting to see where this story goes in subsequent chapters.